Living with the Oaks
Inhabiting our Place
Two and a half Days with Heron Brae and special guests Joe Scott & Katie MacKendrick
Making Food with Acorns
Make place-based food accessible with in-depth, hands-on, step-by-step processing experience to turn acorns delicious.
Oak Ecology
Learn what oaks need to thrive, how oaks make a home for others, how to read the landscape for clues about history and human stories.
Land Restoration
You’re part of the process. Engage in hands-on forestry work of supporting landscape resilience by protecting our local oaks for the long term.
Human-Oak Culture
All over the world where they are found, oaks and humans have formed deep bonds. Explore our stories, heritage, and connections, both from here and afar.
Learn More
Living with the oaks: Inhabiting our place
Many of us crave a deeper sense of belonging with the land. We know there is a history within our ancestral lines where our people participated fully as a part of the living world, just in the way the bear, beaver, and salmon do. We may be from lineages that have forgotten these cultural practices many generations ago; or we may be from people who have preserved this wisdom, and are currently resisting the erasure of our life ways and knowledge. This class is for all of us. We seek to find a way with acorns and oak trees where we are contributing our part to the health of the lands which we call home.
This class is place-based on the southern edge of the Willamette Valley, in-person, and functions at a human-paced time scale. During our time together, we will practice the simple act of caring for oak trees, which are a foundation of our valley life web. We will clear excess fuels with hand tools from around legacy oaks, fuels which resulted from the suppression of fire and Indigenous cultural burning. We will learn about the importance of culture in connection with oak trees, and how to support revitalization of these ways. We will sit still and listen.
Collectively, we will think about the future of food, and how acorns can play a role in sustainable and local food sovereignty, outside of corporate agriculture. We will think about how Indigenous people are reclaiming space and agency in relation to their homelands and traditional practices, and what it means to come from different histories in relation to this place, but all unite in love and care for it.
Individually, you will come away with hands-on acorn processing, cooking, and eating experience. Each step includes many details and you will get a sense of different methods and styles so you can chose what works for you. On our third and final day we will feast with acorns, trying various recipes and styles of cooking acorn.
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Day to Day Topics
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DAY 1: Cultural Grounding, Ecology and Tending Practice (9am-5pm)
Instructors: Heron Brae, Joe Scott, Katie McKendrick
Indigenous Peoples, oaks, acorns, and eco-cultural practices of place; reclaiming
Oak ecology, reading the landscape
Slow observation
Tending in the current era—a past present and future oak place
—Giving fire back
—Centering cultural values in land management
—Social forestry as a model
—Challenges and opportunities
Oak tending—hands on forestry
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DAY 2: Acorns as food (10am-4pm)
Instructors: Heron Brae with Guest Facilitator Joe Scott on 10/18
Acorn culture in our families and around the world
Food security, climate change
Botany, evolutionary history
Thoughtful harvesting
Acorn collection
Hands-on acorn processing including:
—sorting
—drying
—storing
—cracking
—grinding
—leaching
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DAY 3: Acorn Feast (1-6pm)
Instructors: Heron Brae with Guest Facilitator Joe Scott on 10/29
Acorn Nutrition
Collaborative cooking
Cooking styles:
roasting
boiling
baking (also with coals)
pan fry bread
on ashes
hot leaching
Acorn products/sizes:
coarse ground/grits
whole
fine flour
starch
Potential Recipes (subject to change):
fermented paté
dotorimuk: Korean acorn jelly salad
sweet quick bread
pancakes
savory veggie fritters
porridge
roasted nuts
whole as stuffing or chili
ash cakes
acorn balls
gravy
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There will be two cohorts, choose between these dates:
Cohort 1: Weekend Group
DAY 1: Saturday, October 17th (9am-5pm)
DAY 2: Sunday, October 18th (10am-4pm)
DAY 3: (OPTIONAL) Sunday, October 25th (1pm-6pm)
Cohort 2: Weekday Group:
DAY 1: Thursday, October 15th (9am-5pm)
DAY 2: Thursday, October 22nd (10am-4pm)
DAY 3: (OPTIONAL) Thursday, October 29th (1pm-6pm)
Class Size: 12 students
Cost
$600* all three days
$500* for just days 1 & 2.
Indigenous Solidarity Pricing: in acknowledgment of the legacy of stolen Indigenous knowledge and attempted cultural erasure, we encourage all Indigenous People interested to join us, and to pay whatever feels right to you, whether that be full price or $10. We welcome you.
*Scholarships available (full and partial) for anyone to whom the asking price is a barrier. Reach out to Heron and let us know what you need. Please don’t let money keep you from being with us. heron@braebotanicalways.com
Funds for scholarships and Indigenous Solidarity Pricing generously provided by Oregon Department of Forestry Urban and Community Forestry Program and Center for Rural Livelihoods.
Location
Private Farm outside Cottage Grove, OR. Location given on registration.
Optional camping available if traveling from far away for weekend class. Email heron@braebotanicalways.com if you would like to camp.
Food
Lunch provided of local farm fresh whole foods for days 1 and 2
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Accessibility information
*If you need accommodation or have special dietary restrictions, please contact us and make us aware. Heron@braebotanicalways.com
Rugged terrain, slight hills. Some light walking required, dispersed with sitting. We will be moving through the forest on uneven ground without trails and doing physical work such as sawing, bending, and hauling. All people with bodies encouraged to take care of themselves and participate at your comfort level. Full support for having limits. Please communicate specific accessibility needs in advance and we will do our best to support you.
Note: Poison oak will be in the area. We will do our best to avoid the worst of it, but some contact on clothes may be unavoidable.
What to Bring:
outdoor shoes for mud and forest walking
long pants, long sleeves
change of clothes
water bottle
any snacks or meals other than lunch that you may need
safety glasses/protective eye covering
hat
gloves
hand tools if you have them—pruning saw, loppers
notebook if you want to take notes
*Scholarships available (full and partial). Reach out to Heron and let us know what you need. Heron@braebotanicalways.com
Scholarships generously provided by our partners the ODF Urban And Community Forestry Program & the Center for Rural Livelihoods.
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Meet the Team
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![Heron 2026]()
Heron Brae
Heron Brae is an educator and facilitator who works at the intersection of our relationships to the land and our relationships with each other. At Brae Botanical Ways, she offers consulting and classes in field botany, wild-tending, and edible-medicinal uses with a focus on respect to the First People and traditions of place. She also facilitates workshops addressing and healing the legacy of colonialism with affiliates such as Live Oak Consulting and Upper Willamette Stewardship Network. As a dirt worshiping queer femme, she loves exploring edges, and shifting worldviews towards reciprocity and belonging. This work is informed from her own life experience as a big-hearted plant nerd in lifelong unlearning of inherited systems of disconnection. Heron currently lives in the woods on a hill with her cat Shadow and her poetry notebook.
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![Joe Scott]()
Joe Scott
Joe Scott is a member of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians and descendent of the Rogue River Indians of what is now Southwestern Oregon. He currently lives and works on Kalapuya Illahee as a consultant for the Traditional Ecological Inquiry Program. Through this work, Joe collaborates with regional land stewards and educators to support the success of Tribal youth through engagement with Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge. He is an advocate for food sovereignty, Indigenous ecological science, and landscape restoration through cultural burning. He is a cultural fire practitioner and ecologist, artist, scholar, and a lifelong Tribal teacher and learner.
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![Katie MacKendrick]()
Katie MacKendrick
Katie grew up in southern Wisconsin—on ancestral lands of the Ho-Chunk Nation, amidst regal burr oaks and shagbark hickory trees. Her relatives moved from Ireland to midwest cities 5 generations before her. She spent a good part of her childhood helping her parents grow and put up food. Katie has loved plants all her life; her mom started reading horticultural textbooks to her while she was in the womb. She has spent her adult life working with plants as an ecologist, botanist, herbalist, and gardener. For 20 years, she has worked in the PNW with landowners and Tribes on community-based land planning and policy, ecosystem restoration and stewardship, and more recently, bringing good fire back to the land. Katie lives as a guest on Kalapuya land in the southern Willamette Valley. In 2025, she started Fritillaria Botanicals to support local land stewardship organizations through project work, further community fire practice, and build a curated native, fiber, and medicine plant nursery and teaching space. She is motivated to grow her work with plants as a means to connect further with her roots, honor her boundless passion for plants and the land, and aid organizations carrying out vital work in support of the land and people.
Still have questions?If you're interested in joining us but still have questions, feel free to reach out to us. We'll review your message and get back to you within 48 hours.